


Acquittal

by swooning



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:40:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swooning/pseuds/swooning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A post-S3 one-shot featuring angstiness, lyrical smut, and Shakespeare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Acquittal

_Let me not to the marriage of true minds  
Admit impediments. Love is not love  
Which alters when it alteration finds,  
Or bends with the remover to remove:  
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark  
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;  
It is the star to every wandering bark,  
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.  
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks  
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:  
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,  
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.  
_ _If this be error and upon me proved,  
I never writ, nor no man ever loved._   
_\--William Shakespeare_

 

* * *

When do you realize you love someone?

Is it a glance, a touch, a word? Sharing a moment nobody else can understand, an in-joke with your love against the world?

Or is it when the one person you know so well that he does not even need to speak, so well he can admit his own treachery to you with an eloquence that doesn’t require anything more than one moment of his eyes on yours in a public place… admits that treachery, and you realize that your annoyance with him is just that: annoyance. Not ultimate betrayal. It will pass. And it will likely be your turn again, next time, and he will be slower to let it go but  _it will still pass_.

He will still be the person whose voice can help you face your day, whose shoulder is the only one broad enough to accept your callous shove without a flinch. Because now, for better or for worse, he  _is_  that person. There could be no replacement. In part, of course, for practical reasons; there are so few suitable candidates left for the position. But also because you can no longer remember not relying on him for that support.

It is an impossible situation. Laura would never move first, it wasn’t in her nature and that wasn’t the sort of relationship either of them could live with. She could only make transparent the fact that she would not rebuff a move, were he to make one. Some days, she wishes he would; most days, she reluctantly accepts that he is quite right not to.

In this particular instance, however, all that is the furthest it has been from her mind in weeks.

There is the annoyance, to begin with. It was perfidious, his acquitting Baltar, and her anger at that has hardly just evaporated.

There is the wave of awareness that swept over her when the jump to the Ionian Nebula ended with the Cylons once again on top of the fleet. Awareness she should not have had, of something she still isn’t sure of… a connection between her, the Cylons Athena and Caprica Six, and Hera. Why?

There are also the days that have passed since then, with all the revelations those days have held. Starbuck returned, a Cylon by all the evidence, but still bearing the most credible evidence to date of the path to earth. Full details to be provided, however, only if all of them – humans and Cylons alike – can travel there together. The uneasy truce between the human and Cylon fleets, like a heavy blanket of silence covering them all in space. Lasting peace or a calm before the next storm, no way to tell between those two. Baltar vanished, possibly assassinated… well, everyone had been expecting  _that_.

Through it all, there has been the growing effect of the chemotherapy, because neither the cancer nor the chemicals meant to fight it have paused for her convenience; the second and third days after the latest treatment had been the worst, leaving physical exhaustion in their wake for another two days, and then a sense of pervasive wrongness that the chamalla only dulled, never defeated.

And the visions, robbing her of sleep, now even starting to impinge on her days… the opera house, the nebula, the child, the faceless light-forms of the final five Cylons. At least there are no snakes on the podium; indeed, there is no podium, because the fleet is in a state of suspense, not martial law but something new that even the press is too frightened to disturb by shuttling back and forth to gather news.

She has remained on Galactica, for safety and medical supervision, and because Bill demanded it and her initial instinct – to contradict him – was dampened by the very real danger the Cylon fleet still represents. He said she would stay, as if it had already been agreed on, and she stayed. The bed in sickbay, surrounded by fabric partitions, became her latest temporary home; she avoids it as much as possible, preferring to do anything rather than admit that the crisis, the medication, the whole damned situation has driven her off her feet. She can be found instead in the Admiral’s quarters for meals, in the CIC for consultation and tactical discussions, in the ready room for paperwork, and walking the corridors when none of those places can contain her restlessness.

Tory is her near-constant shadow, and Laura has started manufacturing errands for her just to get herself a little respite; her aide is even more intense, if possible, since the fateful jump. She seems to be flinging herself frantically on the altar of worshipping Laura, which used to be flattering but only when her competence was as fervent as her adulation. Now she has achieved some sort of middle ground, an awful peace with whatever demons have recently plagued her, but at the cost of looking haunted and stating everything as if it were life-and-death. Even getting the coffee seems fraught with cosmic overtones, and Laura has quite enough cosmic overtones in her life without adding them to her coffee or her chamalla-laced tea. The tea, of course, has overtones all its own.

Bill finds her when Tory’s gone, asks if the coast is clear.

“For now. I’m running out of things for her to do to get her out of my hair, though. Feel free to give me some ideas.”

He does that thing where he smiles without moving his mouth at all, his particular magic trick, performed only for those who are paying attention. “If I think of anything, I’ll let you know.”

“So what’s up, Admiral? We’ve been all day without alarms going off, I hardly know what to do with myself.”

“You’ve been most of the day without eating, I’ll tell you what to do with yourself. You’re going to march your ass to my quarters for chow.”

“Mmm. Maybe.” She flips another page, engrossed in her comparison of scripture to current events, the words of Pythia and the series of images that the purported Kara Thrace has forwarded to the ship. “Have  _you_  eaten?”

He takes a second too long to answer, and she smiles without looking up.

“I’ll only come if you come with me. You need to eat, too, Bill.”

The non-smile again, a momentary flash of amusement at another connotation. “Sure.”

It is a quiet meal, Laura only taking her attention from her text long enough to bring the fork – too infrequently – to her mouth. Finally, Bill clears his throat pointedly, demanding more than a hurried glance. She lifts her eyes reluctantly, guardedly, only to find him looking away as if he were uneasy about something.

“What?”

“We could see if the galley can come up with something else, if you think…”

“I’m just not hungry because I’m focused on other things right now,” she says gently. “It isn’t the cancer, or the chemo, yet. But thank you.” She closes the book, finally, pushing it a few inches away from her and then drawing her hand back to toy with the edge of her plate.

“You need to take better care of yourself.”

“You’re lecturing me, now?”

They share a look, her amusement trumping his stubbornness. A curl at one corner of his mouth deepens, he chuckles, and the layer of ice between them melts, evaporates away.

“I’ll leave that to Cottle,” he agrees, standing and closing the distance between them, holding out a hand to coax her from her seat. Puzzled, she scoots her chair back and takes his hand. When she stands, they are face to face, Bill doesn’t back away as she’d expected, doesn’t release her hand. On the contrary, he raises his other hand to cup her cheek, and Laura feels a flush rise beneath his palm as the warmth between them gutters and flares and heats to a point they tend to scrupulously avoid.

It is too sudden, she knows his intention a moment before his action and leans away as if by instinct, starting to shake her head. He keeps his hold on her, leaning with her and bringing her back with his eyes. Later, she would remember his expression as one of absolute certainty; whether or not he was even aware of it yet, he had made his decision and would follow through regardless of the outcome. To the death, if necessary. But at the moment, she only knows the spell he casts with his eyes, with his voice, its roughness wearing down the last of her resistance.

“You need to take better care of yourself,” he repeats, “for the time you have left.” He never pulls that punch. “You need to give yourself permission to lose your focus for a little while. For yourself, for the fleet.” He takes a deep breath, looking puzzled at himself for a moment, and then: “You need to let other people take care of you, too…” He is talking to himself, perhaps, as much as he is to her. His thumb traces her cheekbone, the delicate edge of her hairline over her temple, his touch implying what his words hadn’t quite, yet. What they had danced around for so long, the dance had become all they knew anymore. Or so it had seemed. Evidently not; her body remembered well enough what a touch could mean, was remembering more with every stroke of his fingers over her blushing face. She tries calling up her anger at him over Baltar, but it has evaporated after all.

“Bill, I can’t,” she attempts, but he shakes his head, denying her denial. Whether or not he had really even known his own mind when he took her hand, he knows it now, is holding on to her as if he never intends to let go.

“On the bridge the other day, you pushed me away. Over Baltar. You were so pissed off at me, you looked like you wanted to deck me. But you were still  _so_  beautiful.”

“No.” But her whisper has no backbone to it; she is gone, and she knows it.

“I didn’t mean to do this right now.” She believes him; his signals had been too mixed when he started speaking, although they no longer were. He has surprised them both, which is possibly the only way they could now be in this particular circumstance. “But we’ve already waited way too long as it is. Too many lost chances. Laura… I’m not wasting any more chances.” And he tilts his head and kisses her, not missing any part of this opportunity. It is not a chaste kiss, it is not affectionate, it is not sweet. It is a kiss that makes it clear he intends to pursue this subject to its logical completion, here, tonight,  _right now_.

She had fully planned to pull away before he got there, to step out of his reach, to back out of the situation in which they found themselves before it ever reached this point. Because she had no time for this, and neither had he. And she was dying, and the wolf was at the door for the rest of the fleet as well. And for a dozen other reasons she could conjure without even trying. But the point of no return had happened, she sees too late, when Bill had taken her hand and raised her to her feet. She never should have listened to him in the first place, to the words like ‘care,’ and ‘permission,’ and ‘beautiful,’ and ‘time,’ that lulled and seduced at the same time. She should have slipped into one of his own moments of indecision, pressed at that weak point until he relinquished her, and made her escape while she could.

But now she is lost, defenseless, letting herself be bent back over his arm and plundered like the shy maiden she hasn’t been in decades. His kiss, his embrace, drives the sense right out of her when his lips finally take possession of hers, because the last time she did this with a man was years ago, a lifetime ago. And then too, because he’s very good at it, because Bill’s kiss is lighting up nerve endings in places she has been studiously ignoring for far too long. When he finally lets up, she is weak at the knees, palpably shaking, and embarrassed to realize she is already wet with wanting him. It takes all her dwindling fortitude to shove herself aright, to at least attempt to restore sanity to their circumstances.

“Bill,  _you_  were the one who said we had responsibilities,” Laura points out hoarsely, stepping out of the circle of his arms and heading for the couch instead, trying to get the topic and herself as far from the Admiral and his treacherous lips as possible. “Those haven’t gone away, in fact, if anything – “

He has followed her,  _chased_  her, and now pins her to his chest quite firmly, wrapping his arms around her waist, nudging her hair out of the way and speaking into her neck. “I’m not gonna talk about all the ways the situation has changed since that conversation, Laura.” With his words come kisses, comes the subtle scrape of teeth and breath against the delicate flesh of her ear, and she stops struggling because she is suddenly melting, and she knows her legs won’t support her any more without his assistance. “You want this as much as I do,” he states firmly, almost resignedly... their joint fate is no more convenient for him than for her. Her only response is a wrenching little sob as his tongue slips along her earlobe, as the deep shudder that wracks her body gives her away entirely. He is quite right, of course. She  _does_  want this, might have agreed to it long ago if only he had proposed it. If wanting it had made it a good idea, they would have been doing it since shortly after they’d first met. Her current objection is only for form…  _one_  of them, at least, should assert the sensible position.

He turns her slowly around, and this time when he kisses her with such purpose, it sticks – she can no longer formulate even an incoherent protest. When allowed the chance to breathe again, she can only breathe, not think, clutching weakly at his chest, eyes flying open when his hands slip down to cup her buttocks and press her firmly against him.

She knows his response before she speaks, but tries anyway, one last effort for propriety’s sake, and it is a brutal effort. “Bill… frakking me won’t make the cancer go away.” And there it is, the look of exquisite pain she knew would come, and she knows exactly how it feels because it is really more her pain than his at this stage. She expects anger next, and thinks that perhaps putting the sex on that footing (for she has accepted that, regardless of anything else, there  _is_  going to be sex between them this night) will make it somehow easier, leave them both less vulnerable, give the fallout from their encounter a structure and a framework they could both live with afterwards: embarrassment, further arguments, and the avoidance of having to decide just what their relationship was turning into.

What Laura doesn’t expect is Bill’s hand, which reaches up without preamble and cups her breast lightly, his fingertips stroking, thumb unerringly finding her nipple through layers of cotton and lace although his eyes never leave hers. Something about that, the weight of his sad eyes on hers while he caresses her breast for the first time, is almost overwhelmingly intimate. “Bill…”

“Shhh.” He does something tricky with the side of his thumb, and she gasps as a shock of pleasure runs through her… straight from her breast, which is slowly killing her, to her clitoris, which is now throbbing in time with her heartbeat. And his eyes never let hers go, never allow her to hide one shred of what she feels, and for the first time since she let him pull her towards him she realizes just how much trouble she is in. She realizes that Bill’s intention has almost nothing to do with the satiation of lustful need, and everything to do with bringing the two of them even closer, creating a  _new_  need and dependence of which the sex will be only the outward sign. He isn’t an Adar. He  _means_  this. He never did anything in his life by half-measures, after all, and he was not going to make any exceptions or allowances in her case.  _Least_  of all in her case…

He  _loves_  her. She sees it now, for the first time, and wonders how she could have missed it before. And he is waiting, she realizes, for something from her. Her towel, thrown into the ring, perhaps. Hesitantly, feeling near tears with desperation and the terror of the unknown, she leans in against the sinful pressure of his hand, weaves her fingers through his hair, and presses her lips to his. Chastely, at first, and then more and more wantonly as she warms to her task, throwing caution to the wind; if this is to be inevitable, she wants to control  _some_  part of it, and perhaps that part can be driving Bill to very sweet distraction. If memory serves, she’s more than capable. If his response is any indication, her memory serves her well; he abandons her breast to slide both hands over her hips again, working his leg between her thighs this time when he pulls her against his growing hardness, and groaning in approval when she grinds deliberately against him.

Then the time for thinking, for second-guessing, is past for both of them; he somehow leads her to the bed, her shirt and trousers are somehow on the floor, and she only knows she is going along willingly with whatever he does. When he bends to suckle at her breast, fondling the other one in counterpoint, Laura raises to her toes to find him a better angle, unhooks and removes the bra he has only impatiently shoved just far enough out of his way. She naively thinks she would be more than content to have him pay her this particular sort of attention all night – until he moves his other hand from her hip, slipping it beneath the waistband of her panties and resting the backs of his fingertips just above the triangle of curls there. Then,  _then_ , she realizes she is no longer content at all; she growls and arches still closer to him, reaches for his wrist to encourage him along.

For a very short time, he humors her, drawing back just enough to look her in the eye again as he allows her to direct his hand to where she so keenly wants it; he observes her face closely as he teases his fingers between her folds, slips one fingertip just that bit deeper with a satisfied smirk at how wet she already is, brushes so lightly against her aching clit that she would almost have thought it accidental had he not repeated the barely-there touch a few more times. Biting her lip, she lets her eyes drift shut in pleasure, but… “Look at me,” he instructs, and for whatever reason, she obeys. And is rewarded by a firmer touch, a swirl against that tender bundle of nerves, making her whimper twice – when it happens, and when it stops.

A very few times on New Caprica, when she allowed herself to think that the respite there might turn into a permanent arrangement, Laura had also allowed herself the luxury of fantasy… and how could anyone have resisted, who had the imagination? The planet itself and the pitiful colony there offered so very little in the way of stimulation, the only option was to turn inward. And turn she had, though some part of her felt it was a character flaw to let herself go there, to  _not_  school her thoughts and her impulses. Lying on her narrow, rickety cot, trying to find the comfortable position that experience told her didn’t exist, her writhing had sometimes perversely awakened other discomforts. And every so often, she had given in.

The first possibility her mind had lit upon was Adama, and she was hardly surprised. He became her stock character, and on those few occasions, things had progressed in her fantasies in one of only two ways. Either there was a precipitating argument, his voice gruff and angry, hers quieting to a threatening hiss, and when they came together it was with a ferocity that left them both – or at least left Laura, there on her cot with her eyes shut tight – utterly spent… or it was Laura doing the seducing, doing it on purpose, teasing until a hapless Bill could no longer resist, and then teasing some more until he was ready to jump or service her or die at her slightest command. Either way, she slept a little better afterward, though she sometimes wondered how she would feel about the actual Adama when she saw him again.

As it happened, by the time she did see him again, they were once again too busy to be much concerned with distractions like sex. Not that it wasn’t there, haunting, lurking, as it had before… but as always, the sheer impracticality of it was assumed by both of them to be insurmountable.

Impractical, but not impossible, it has turned out. Laura struggles to regain control of the situation, to throw Bill as off-balance as she feels. Nothing they have done this evening remotely resembles any feeling she had during her own furtive sessions with the Bill of her fantasy. When he takes his hand away, she wants to cry; instead, she forces herself forward, attacking his jacket buttons, freeing them with swift determination. He moves to help, but she doesn’t want that, she wants him surprised, not on her wavelength. Laura leaves the jacket to him, drops her hands to his pants, has his belt and fly unfastened before he has finished removing his upper garments. When his trousers are roughly at knee level, she turns a nonchalant back to him and climbs onto the bunk, sparing barely a glance back.

Now she is a step ahead, can watch him finish disrobing with at least the appearance of poise, all the while shoving the covers back, adjusting the pillows to her liking. She reclines and adopts a posture calculated to allure, probably a superfluous move given that she is currently draped on the man’s bed in only her underwear, displaying no little impatience while he divests himself of even that much coverage and finally joins her.

“You forgot something,” Bill comments, kneeling over her and fingering the edge of the patch of silk that is now the only thing left between them. All her work at gaining the upper hand is undone when she looks at his face and sees his lips curled in something like an actual smile. The smile, his finger now tucked under the elastic at her hip, the way his hair feathers away from his temples, his  _eyes_ …

If he’s disappointed when she pushes the last item of clothing off herself without further dissembling, without coyness, he hides it well. She is simply tired of waiting any longer for the outcome, wants it done with, or at least started, what they have finally arrived in Bill’s bunk to do after so long. Their strange relationship, which in many ways has been the opposite of courtship, deliberately avoiding anything that might have led them here, has culminated in this anyway, and Laura wants to follow through on the inevitability that has them both in its grasp.

There are many things he would have liked to do, different paths to take, but when she reaches out to him, pulls him down with her, Bill is as susceptible to the inevitable as the next man; from the silky feel of her hand around his cock to the hot, tight pressure of her body accepting him in a series of awkward little adjustments, increments of sinking into heaven, it is a matter of mere seconds. The threshold crossed irrevocably, in such a brief span of time. Only one more hurdle left, that of completion; she tries to rush him there, lifting her hips into the counterpressure of her thighs around his waist.

Bill outweighs her, however, and doesn’t want to be drawn. He pushes up to his arms and stares down at her, hips flexed firmly into hers, and waits. Waiting is the last thing she wants to do, but she has no more control over this piece of time than over any other, it seems. He appears to be concentrating so hard on her, she wonders what he actually sees. Is it anything like what she knows to be there? Does he see something she can’t see, about herself?

“Laura,” he says after several more moments of still silence than she had expected, “that night on New Caprica, you said…” He moves despite himself, straining further into her with a hiss, a sigh, a visible clenching of his jaw. “You said we should just enjoy it.”

“It was such a different time,” she protests, but a tear slides down her face as the words leave her mouth; it is too late already, it was too late when she allowed herself to be pulled to her feet after dinner. It has  _always_  been too late.

“We should just enjoy  _this_ ,” he repeats, willing her into the moment he occupies, waiting for her to join him there. “Nothing else, right now...just this.”

“I know,” she agrees, arching her back and trying not to sob when he moves again, and she lets herself feel him there, inside her body, which has welcomed him in more easily than her heart and mind. He wipes her tears away gently, licks the salt from his fingertip and gives it back to her on his lips, but he can’t wipe them all away. Bill laughs in disbelief, in wonder, maybe even to avoid crying himself. Because Laura is laughing now, too, crying and laughing and raising her hips in time with his thrusts. When she realizes she is about to come, is too close to pull back from the edge, she is actually startled for a moment, and it makes her laugh even harder through her tears. His hold on her is almost painful, but she wraps herself around him just as tightly. She lets him become her world in that moment, her orgasm sweeping through her and around him, and washing her tears away into sweet relief.

Bill is steady, purposeful, above and inside her. He waits her out, watching, but can’t hold himself back forever. When her look of amazement hits him full-on, he groans and clutches her tighter still, shifting for leverage, moving faster and faster into her embrace until he releases himself inside her with a cry. Her name, or the gods, or nothing so specific… or love.


End file.
